Everyone who is interested in this question is welcome to join us next Thursday and Friday for the Participation work week. Please come with ideas you have about this question. Here is one idea I’m thinking about that feels like an important part of a radical participation plan.

Slow Down

I’ve worked at small software start-ups and I’ve worked at large volunteer-based organizations. There are many differences between the two. The speed that information reaches everyone is a major difference.

For example, I worked at a small start-up called Alphanumerica. There were a dozen of us all working together in the same small space. Here’s a picture of me in my corner (to give you an idea of how old this photo is it was taken on a digital camera that stored photos on a floppy disk.)

To make sure everyone knew about changes, you could get everyone’s attention and tell them. People could then go back to work and everyone would be on the same page. In this setting, moving fast and breaking things works.

Information doesn’t spread this quickly in a globally distributed group of tens of thousands of staff and volunteers. In this setting, if things are moving too fast then no one is on the same page and coordinating becomes very difficult.

Mozilla is not a small start-up where everyone is physically together in the same space. We need to move fast though, so how can we iterate and respond quickly and keep everyone on the same page?

Slow Down To Go Fast Later

It might seem odd, but there is truth to the idea that you can slow down now in order to go faster later. There is even research that backs this up. There’s a Harvard Business Review article on this topic worth reading—this paragraph covers the main take-aways:

In our study, higher-performing companies with strategic speed made alignment a priority. They became more open to ideas and discussion. They encouraged innovative thinking. And they allowed time to reflect and learn. By contrast, performance suffered at firms that moved fast all the time, focused too much on maximizing efficiency, stuck to tested methods, didn’t foster employee collaboration, and weren’t overly concerned about alignment

For Mozilla, would radical participation look like setting goals around alignment and open discussions? Would it be radical to look at other large volunteer-based organizations and see what they optimize for instead of using start-ups as a model?

I’m very interested to hear what people think about the value of slowing down at Mozilla as well as hearing other ideas about what radical participation looks like. Feel free to comment here, post your own blog and join us in Portland.

I recently got back from my first Mozilla Festival and I’ve been thinking about what I experienced there. There is too much to fit in one post, so I want to focus on the question that came up in Mitchell’s keynote: What does radical participation look like?

I have some thoughts about this and I’m interested in hearing what other people think. To get the conversation going, I’ll share one idea about what it would look like for Mozilla to have radical participation today.

For a comparison with another volunteer-based organization, at the American Red Cross volunteers constitute about 90% of the workforce. The Red Cross staff are mostly supporting those volunteers rather than doing the work of responding to disasters themselves.

We should measure the percentage of tasks done by volunteers across the whole project and set goals to get it closer to the example set by the Red Cross. Some areas, like SUMO and Location Services, are close to this today. Let’s take the knowledge they’re gaining and bring it to other teams to help them scale contributions.

There will certainly be challenges doing this and it might not make sense for all teams. For instance, with the coding example above it might not be productive to have more volunteers submitting patches. This is an assumption that should be tested though.

We could use Dietrich’s model to support large groups focused on innovating in areas that will be relevant to us 2 or 3 years out, such as looking into how we can shape an open Internet of Things. We couldn’t hire 1,000 staff to focus on an Internet of Things research effort, but we could build a community of 1,000 volunteers to do that.

Wikipedia says that there are about 1,000 employees of Microsoft Research. I’m assuming Microsoft wouldn’t be willing to close that department and replace their R&D efforts with volunteers.

So having volunteers do more of the tasks with staff focused on supporting them feels to me like one part of radical participation. What do you think? What else could we be doing to get to a point of radical participation?

Please take a few minutes to fill this out and then share this link with the communities you work with. Having more people complete this will give us a more complete understanding of how we can improve the experience for all contributors.

We plan to have results from this survey and the data analysis project available by the time of the Portland work week in December.

When i got involved with Mozilla in 1999, it was clear that something big was going on. The mozilla.org site had a distinctly “Workers of the world, unite!” feel to it. It caught my attention and made me interested to find out more.

The language on the site had the same revolutionary feel as the design. One of the pages talked about Why Mozilla Matters and it was an impassioned rallying cry for people to get involved with the audacious thing Mozilla was trying to do.

“The mozilla.org project is terribly important for the state of open-source software. […] And it’s going to be an uphill battle. […] A successful mozilla.org project could be the lever that moves a dozen previously immobile stones. […] Maximize the opportunity here or you’ll be kicking yourself for years to come.”

Another change is that our competition has adopted many of the tactics of working in the open that we pioneered. Google, Apple and Microsoft all have their own opensourcecommunities today. So how can we compete with companies that are bigger than us and are borrowing our playbook?

Mozilla just launched the Open Standard site and one of the first articles posted is “Struggle For An Open Internet Grows“. This shows how the challenges of today are not the same challenges we faced 16 years ago, so we need to do new things in new ways to advance our mission.

Building the community that can do this is work we need to start on. What doesn’t serve our community any more? What do we need to do that we aren’t? What works that needs to get scaled up? Mozillians of the world, unite and help answer these questions.

I’m very excited to see the new version of Mozilla’s Get Involved page go live. Hundreds of people each week come to this page to learn about how they can volunteer. Improvements to this page will lead to more people making more of an impact on Mozilla’s projects.

We’ve spent far more time researching, prototyping, designing, testing, upgrading and building than ever before. This reflects Mozilla’s focus this year of enabling communities that have impact and that goal has mobilized experts from many teams who have made the experience for new volunteers who use this page much better.

All of these pieces are coming together and will give us a number of options for how we can continue and increase the investment in community in 2015. Look for more thoughts soon on why that is important, what that could look like and how you could help shape it.

There are still many more questions than answers right now though and there is much more to learn. A contributor audit was done in 2011 that had useful findings and recommendations, but it has now been 3 years since that research was completed. It is time to do more.

Research has provided other community-driven organizations with lessons that help them be more successful. For example, Lego has an active community and research has helped them develop a set of principles that promote successful interactions that provide value for both community members and the Lego organization.

We’ll be kicking off a new research project soon and we’d love to get your help. This will involve creating a survey to send out to Mozillians and will also dive into the contributor data we’ve started collecting. This won’t answer all the questions we have, but this will give us some insight and can provide a starting point for other research projects.